Alber Elbaz (Hebrew: אלבר אלבז, born 6 February 1961) is a Moroccan-Israeli fashion designer. After a number of other fashion houses, he was the creative director Lanvin in Paris from 2001 until October 2015.
I don't think that you can write music if you don't know how to play an instrument. You have to know the basics, then you can go forward.
I don’t take drugs because if I did I’d love them–I’d be a junkie. And because I’m Jewish, I’d probably be a dealer, too.
I am not interested in perfection, and neither are the women who wear my clothes.
I was thinking recently, If the body really is the new dress, as some are saying - with women buying boobs, butts, faces - then who needs a dressmaker? So I started designing spring like a plastic surgeon - everything stretchy and nude. But after three weeks, I was so bored with myself and the world, I began adding diamond butterflies and chiffon and colors. I realized that fashion is not about second skin. It's not the perfect white shirt or camel jacket. What women need is a dream.
To be a fashion critic is easy because you just say, 'I love it, I hate it,' but life is more than love and hate.
I created the peplum so you can eat in it. You can have a dessert, you can have another sandwich.
I am very much a people person.
Fashion doesn't look good only on models; it can look good on different people of different ages and different body shapes.
Why not touch things that we hate and turn them upside down and inside out?
Almost every collection I do has 200 different references. I don't have two of the same coat, two of the same dress. I have it in one color, in one fabric. I've tried to adapt the culture of couture, and the know-how and the heritage, but I try to update it.
If I were a buyer today in one of the American department stores, I would go with extremes-the most beautiful, the more expensive, the more eccentric. I would take risks. The worst thing would be to buy only the little black dress. You know why? Because everyone has it already. I would go with a purple dress, something different
We are comfortable with formulas, but the best happens when the formula doesn't work.
With fashion, I barely finish one collection before I must start another.
Wear flats. You're short. It's much cooler not to pretend.
I like having the freedom to dress as I desire.
I'm not a plastic surgeon, and I cannot change the DNA of a person, but when I see a woman try on my clothes and she feels beautiful, I know I am doing my job.
Some days I feel like a piano: kind of short, always in black & white, always expected to produce music.
If I wasnt a designer, I would love to be a doctor. That is my fantasy, my dream. A doctor will give you a tablet if you have a headache, and I will give you a dress, and we both make you feel good.
The designers, photographers and models I work with, they are really hard-working people who are devoting their lives to fashion. They're kind of like nuns of fashion.
I want to know where is that committee in Switzerland that sits to decide what is in and what is out. I don't listen to the formula makers. I think maybe I have a selective hearing disorder.